At my company, groupSPARK - the leader in Private Label Exchange Hosting, we watch all Microsoft Exchange Server-related developments very closely for obvious reasons. I have to admit that this new development caught me off guard. To understand the significance of this change, let's look at the history first.
Microsoft Exchange Server has the largest share in email server software today and Lotus Domino/Notes continues to lose market share to Exchange. Organizations pay a massive premium for the collaboration and accessibility features that POP3 email lacks. Because the market for groupware email software is lucrative, numerous companies have tried to take market share from Microsoft Exchange Server for many years by writing their own email server software and replicating the groupware functionality of Exchange Server - such as calendar sharing - and tying into Microsoft Outlook client. I still remember installing Samsung Contact years ago!
Since Microsoft started bundling Outlook into the Office suite, Outlook has slowly become the most ubiquitous email client used by organizations. In my opinion, Outlook was the key to Lotus Domino's decline as the Lotus Notes client was never as good. And it is because of Outlook's immense popularity that every entrant to the email server market has had to figure out how to integrate with Outlook - this is invariably the key to their success. Many of these companies tried doing this by writing an Outlook plug-in so that Outlook could communicate with their server using their own proprietary protocols, but the plug-ins were usually a pain to install and didn't integrate deeply. However, companies like Zimbra spent a lot of time and resources and ultimately succeeded in reverse-engineering the Microsoft protocol used between Exchange and Outlook to communicate. This protocol is called MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface) and Microsoft has kept it confidential so that Exchange competitors can't tie into Outlook.
BUT, it's a secret no more! Yes, Microsoft has now made available the entire MAPI protocol for licensing to anyone, including competitors. And they've renamed it from MAPI to Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol. I suspect that Microsoft is finally doing this now in response to the ruling in the European Union which dictates that Microsoft must open up its communication protocols to the industry.
So, is the downfall for Microsoft Exchange Server beginning ? No, not really. Over the years, more and more features have been added to Exchange that make it much better: more robust, fault tolerant, deep integration with other Microsoft products, and productivity features such as Instant Messaging, Unified Messaging, increased collaboration. As the economy continues to focus more on the knowledge worker, the productivity features that Microsoft adds become more valued. But, this development does make Exchange Server vulnerable to competitors that will offer half the functionality for half the price - I believe that these alternatives will be successful at the low end and occupy a space between POP3 and Exchange. Within the next few years, there will more credible competition chipping away at Microsoft Exchange Server's dominance, which will force Microsoft to innovate faster. The messaging market just got a whole lot more interesting!
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Comment by Anonymous on Friday, March 23, 2007
Sorry, but I don't get your reasoning here.
You claim that Notes/Domino lost market share to Outlook/Exchange because the Outlook client was perceived to be easier to use than the Notes client. I don't think that there's any arguing with that point.
So why would the opening of MAPI be a threat? Surely, companies buy Exchange so they can use the Outlook client; not the other way around. Why would a company spend all that money for Exchange and then use a different client than Outlook? Doesn't make sense to me.
Still, MS should be worrying about Exchange, IMHO, but not because they've had to open MAPI up. Exchange 2007 doesn't offer any real compelling reasons to upgrade that I can see. Unified messaging doesn't float my boat (who uses voicemail any more, unless they absolutely have to?) And Instant Messaging was taken out of Exchange and spun off as a seperate product years ago. (You can pretty well kiss goodbye to Public Folders too).
What Exchange 2007 does have is a boat load of upgrade "issues". Like having to upgrade your hardware (probably), your OS (definitely) and your mail server all in one go, for example. And when you've gone through that pain, what do you end up with, that you didn't have before?
Cheers,
- Mike
(Disclaimer: I'm a Notes Developer, or will be when I get a job!)
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, March 23, 2007
Microsoft releasing MAPI standards does mean other clients can be developed, it means other servers can provide Exchange services to Outlook Clients.
Comment by Anonymous on Saturday, March 24, 2007
Mike, to clarify: now that Microsoft has released the MAPI protocol specification, this means that anyone who wants to write their own email server can now deeply integrate into MS Outlook. Thus, corporations can buy a cheaper email server software (instead of Exchange) and still have their users continue to use Outlook as the client.
Yes, Exchange 2007 is not an easy upgrade - it does require buying new hardware in many cases and installing a new OS. But, because the new version is spawning a new upgrade cycle for businsesses, hosted exchange is becoming an increasingly more popular option.
Comment by Anonymous on Saturday, March 24, 2007
Hi there. Richi Jennings, the ex-CTO of Samsung Contact here.
A bit of a nitpick: MAPI isn't a protocol, it's an API. The protocol is often known as MAPI/RPC (i.e. a remote procedure call encapsulation of MAPI -- although it's not as simple as that). As you point out, Microsoft now have an official name for MAPI/RPC and now are licensing it.
Zimbra didn't go the MAPI/RPC route. It developed a MAPI service provider -- i.e. what you're calling a "plug in". This is basically the same architecture as Samsung Contact and HP OpenMail before it (and Scalix, the other OpenMail spin-off).
However, other vendors do use MAPI/RPC. Notably, PostPath (which reverse-engineered it) and Cemaphore (which licensed it).
Comment by Anonymous on Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Part of the big cost of Outlook/Exchange is the combination of both the client and the server licenses. Replacing Exchange on the backend with something less expensive only cuts a portion of the cost of email for knowledge workers. Ultimately, companies would have to decide to take a substantial risk moving away from Exchange for this minimized cost savings.
Cheap email solutions have long been available for non-knowledge workers: POP3 etc. Or how about IBM Workplace? Nevermind...
IBM bought Lotus in the first place primarily because it could sell mainframes and mid-range systems that ran Domino. A Z series or System i can host far more mailboxes than a Windows cluster and at far greater profit to IBM. But Exchange only runs on Windows.
Real change in this market would most likely be effected by profit-making from the platform that hosts the server. For example: Gmail. If Google could deeply integrate Outlook clients through RPC/HTTP, that would attract some attention.
Comment by Anonymous on Thursday, May 03, 2007
Since I am not a fan of Microsoft or their products, when my employer said that all employees will stop using our old calendar software and start using the MS Exchange calendar service, I was disappointed. However, I learned that I could probably use Exchange's web interface instead of loading MS software on my computer. I made an attempt at that, but I find that the web interface only offers the bare minimum access to Exchange. It's not possible to change many settings, rules, access shared calendars, etc.
I began to think that I should try to reverse-engineer the Exchange protocol. That's when I noticed your article. I think it's good that MS has published the protocol/API, but I'm disappointed, again, that apparently one must pay for this knowledge. So maybe I will have to reverse-engineer parts of the protocol myself, or see if Zimbra offers any information about it.
Comment by Anonymous on Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Hosted exchanges are growing in popularity. They are the future. Nothing bad here.
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